A BRIGHTER SHADE OF PALE

A SKI SAFARI ACROSS THE CRAGGY DOLOMITES REVEALS SHIMMERING POWDER FIELDS AND RICHLY PRESERVED VALLEY MICROCULTURES

- TOBY SKINNER

It's not often that Marika Favé falls silent. It's a spring morning on the packed, sun-streaked gondola to the peak of the Marmolada glacier, the highest point in the Dolomites.

Our impish mountain guide-a fast-talking former Italian national skier, whose family has lived in the Fassa Valley for generations-has been telling us about the grimly determined Austro-Hungarian soldiers who dug a small city into the ice up here during the Great War.

But as the gondola passes another rocky bluff, and great blankets of untouched, shadow-draped powder come into view under an inky sky, the war stories cease and she looks almost wistful, before a grin spreads across her face. We don't know exactly what the plan is when the gondola clanks to a halt at the Punta Rocca, at 10,700 feet, or what the viewing platform over the entirety of the Dolomites will reveal. But the mountain air seems to crackle with suspended energy: the palpable sense that, on this exact Thursday morning in March, something very good is about to happen.

It's the fourth morning of a seven-day ski safari across the Dolomites, which involves us snowboarding to a new lodging each night; our bags appearing, as if by magic, at a mix of crisp modern hotels with glassy spas and family-run mountain rifugios, the latter often with a son or partner in an improbably good locavore kitchen. The trip has been organised by Dolomite Mountains, an innovative and impressive company founded by Argentine Agustina Lagos Marmol and run mainly by a group of warmly no-nonsense women.